LBMES member takes home CIWEM trophy

Leeds Bradford Materials Engineering Society

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29 Mar 2012

Andrew Nichols of the University of Bradford has taken home the trophy for first prize in the 2012 Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management "New Generations" competition, held at Arup in Leeds 28th March 2012.

His work entitled "Remote charactersisation of wastewater flows from the 'fingerprint' of their free surface" was awarded the Otter trophy after competing against 2 other finalists.

An abstract of his work is outlined below.

The UK's drainage infrastructure is ageing, and rising urbanisation is
causing increased loading on our sewer system. More intelligent use of our
existing drainage assets is essential to reducing blockage and flood events,
and this is only possible through more effective and widespread monitoring of
flow and conduit conditions.

The best technologies at present are too invasive (requiring regular cleaning),
and too costly for mass deployment. Also, whilst they are able to estimate flow
velocity and depth, they cannot measure the condition of the pipe or the
turbulence properties.

In this project, a patented acoustic device has been developed which is capable
of remotely characterising the temporal and spatial properties (the
‘fingerprint’) of flowing water surfaces. This ‘fingerprint’ is found to
contain a wealth of information about the flow and conduit properties, such as
flow depth, mean velocity and wall roughness. This results in the opportunity
for a new generation of flow monitoring device which is low-cost, non-invasive,
and suitable for widespread deployment.